Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 4 -- David Agranoff

Here's the fourth installment in our semi-regular feature, getting to know the speakers at this year's Dick-Fest (June 13-16th in Fort Morgan, Colorado). This time it's hardcore accomplishist and DickHeads Podcaster David Agranoff!

What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

    My research is focused on two aspects of Phil’s work. I consider myself an expert in Phil’s novel writing formula (as laid out in a 1965 letter to fellow author Ron Goulart) and Preview the research involved in my upcoming book Unfinished PKD: The Outlines and Fragments of Philip K. Dick by David Agranoff. It will be the first release of EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES a series of PKD themed non-fiction books, a side line started by Professor D.Harlan Wilson, as a sub-press from his publishing company Anti-Oedipus Press. He was my dream editor for the book, and then we ended teaming up on the Dickheads Podcast.
    The talk will include deep dives into the materials I used to write this book about 17 outlines and fragments that Phil never got around to writing. So I am going to talk about how the research
was done, where treasures I found and what people can look forward to in the book. It is pretty impossible to be humble about this book. The outline for the novel Anti-Talent eventually morphed into UBIK. That research alone will change how Phil and his writing is taught. That Anti-talent outline which Phil never meant for anyone but himself to read, talks to himself, convinces himself into and out of plot directions, tells himself which ideas he is repeating and openly mentions influences.

How’d you get involved in Dickdom?

I have been reading PKD since the 90s, but I didn’t become a serious Dickhead until my homey Anthony Trevino (who I co-wrote a SF/Horror/Crime novel Nightmare City that is available from Grand Mal Press) pointed out that there is no podcast about Philip K. Dick called Dickheads, and what a shame that was. The idea was that we would read each novel in publication order. The show was co-hosted by Anthony, myself and our friend Langhorne J. Tweed. Six years later, Anthony left the show and Professor D.Harlan Wilson has taken his seat. We are almost done covering the novels. We also have done lots of bonus interviews, panel interviews and more. We were started I barely knew anything and now I am a bit of know-it-all.

What kind of Dick-related work are you currently involved in? 

    Still working on the podcast, I am a nerd for all science fiction history and I also write a column for Amazing Stories. I am doing the final edits on Unfinished PKD. I recently used the PKD formula to write a novel called “Great America in Dead World,” I will be figuring out a publisher for that in the next year or so. Keith Giles and I will be co-editing Dickapedia: A Philip K. Dick encyclopedia. That is a fun project and all volunteer, and in we are putting together a team of volunteers to help us do the research. Each team member will be assigned a novel. You’ll get your name on the back cover, and a bio in the book. Dickfest is a great place to work on those community ties if you want to get involved in that.
    I also just released my 10 th novel and it is very Philip K. Dick influenced. The novel is called People’s Park. It is a really weird novel and I hope people check it out. Bring a copy of any of my books to Dick fest I would love to sign it. I will have a few to sell. My holocaust revenge horror novel The Last Night to Kill Nazis is available nationally at Barnes and Noble so buy that and bring it!
    More importantly come to Dick fest and lets talk PKD! You don’t want to miss it!

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 3 -- D.H. Wilson

Here's another in my semi-regular profiles of the scheduled guests for this year's Dick-Fest in Ft. Morgan, Colorado, June 13-16. In this post we'll meet, doctoral Dick-Head D.H. Wilson (the picture is Brett Weldele's rendering of DH as Gully Foyle from Bester’s The Stars My Destination -- not directly Dick-related, but we'll accept it). 

TDH: What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

Hello! I’ll provide an overview of the book I’m currently working on, The Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions, for Routledge’s Auto/Biography Studies series. Here’s a brief description that I included in my proposal to the publisher: Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific, forward-thinking authors and a luminary of intelligent, idea-driven science fiction. His singular oeuvre, esoteric mythos, and chronically autobiographical novels and stories have generated a surplus of biographies in an effort to uncover his “real” identity. Most attempts to biographically render PKD in the light of would-be “truth,” however, are undergirded by a speculative conundrum that his characters and their author cannot escape themselves. Infinite Regressions will unpack this overarching thesis while functioning as an engaged overview of the biographical literature on PKD. PKD scholarship is vast, but my monograph will be the first comprehensive study to account for and interpret this material as a collective literary venture. I appropriated my subtitle from PKD’s Exegesis, an 8,000-page journal inspired by a hallucinatory breakdown that he experienced in the 1970s. Written between 1974 and his death in 1982, the Exegesis is an epic attempt to understand an ostensible trickster god, and yet every gesture towards definitive knowledge results in “an infinite regression of theses and countertheses.” Biographers fall through a similar trap door when they try to “understand” PKD, but that isn’t to say that their biographies aren’t productive or meaningful. As literary artefacts, they are largely meritorious. Ultimately, then, PKD’s biographies call attention to the inherent instability and variability of biographical writing, which has always evaded a grand definition.

TDH: What’s your connection to Dickdom?

Most recently, the Dickheads Podcast. In 2023, I became a co-host with David Agranoff and Langhorne J. Tweed, who started the podcast with Anthony Trevino in 2017. Such great fellas. I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about PKD for years, though, beginning in graduate school in the 1990s at the University of Massachusetts, where I was working on my M.A. degree in English. In an independent study with SF scholar Robert Crossley, I read The Man in the High Castle and “Faith of Our Fathers.” Thereafter I devoured his entire canon, as we PKD fanatics tend to do, and I remember trying (and failing) to emulate him again and again when I first started writing my own fiction.

TDH: Tell us about your new publishing endeavor.

Research and note-taking for Infinite Regressions is occupying most of my time right now, although I have a monograph on Stanley Kubrick’s futurist cinema coming out in November from Stalking Horse Press called Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness. Very excited about that one. As editor-in-chief of Anti-Oedipus Press, I should also mention that I’ll be spearheading a new PKD book series. Here’s the formal description on AOP’s website: EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES is devoted to original, high-quality scholarship on and about Philip K. Dick, one of the science fiction genre’s most renowned innovators and a singular voice in twentieth-century literature. Books in the series include critical and/or creative explorations of Phildickian fiction, nonfiction, biography, cinema, and multimedia. Scholarly yet defiant of academic stodge, EXEGETICS aspires for the definitively New in the world(s) of PKD.

More details soon!

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 2 -- Blake Wilson

In preparation for the upcoming Dick-Fest 2024 in Fort Morgan this June, Total Dick-Head is running a series of interviews with fest guests. This week it's Blake Wilson. 

TDH: Can you tell us a little about how you got interested in Philip K. Dick?

Blake Wilson: I can literally point to the first PKD I read: it was Phil's 1981 letter to David Hartwell (editor, Timescape Books) outlining his would-be next novel The Owl in Daylight. It was published for the first time in issue #13 of the late great fanzine Forced Exposure, which came out in the winter of 1988. I was an avid FE reader in the late 80s, mostly due to the excellent writing and music coverage by Jimmy Johnson and Byron Coley. I liked a lot of the music they liked (Sonic Youth, Big Black, Swans, Mission of Burma). They also loved PKD and his name had popped up in some earlier issues, but the letter was the first thing I read. I was fascinated. I had to find out more about him. The problem? Nothing was in print––at least nothing I could find, and used bookstores weren't turning up anything. I kind of forgot about him until I received a piece of junk mail a year or so later from the Quality Paperback Book Club, one of those "book of the month" subscription deals. Lo and behold! There it was: the first omnibus edition of The VALIS Trilogy! Brand new! I ticked the box and agreed to join. I may have literally taped a penny to a postcard and sent it back, which is how those clubs worked back in the day. VALIS arrived a few weeks later. I read it. It blew my mind. I still have that copy, dogeared and heavily penciled, held together with more than one layer of packing tape. The next QPBC mailer offered The Nag Hammadi Library by James Robinson, which would have blown right past me but for the PKD book I had just read....my first "PKD moment," perhaps? So I added that to the growing collection, which soon included the fruits of intensified used book scouting in Sacramento, San Francisco, Berkeley, and the rest of California. I also somehow ended up on Mark Zieising's mailing list, so I was able to score a brand new copy of Dark Haired Girl directly from him. When Sutin's biography and the Vintage editions started coming out in the early 90s it suddenly seemed like PKD was everywhere. The so-called "mainstream" novels all appeared around this time as well––for better or for worse. It was somewhat of an embarrassment of riches to be in the middle of this PKD “revival” as it were, but very exciting. 

TDH: Tell us a little about your PKD-related publications and endeavors... 

Blake Wilson: I currently have two book chapters in print. One of them is in the book The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy (Open Court, 2017) and it gets into what I take to be PKD's politics and how they weave their way into the book and, less subtly, into the TV series. The other is in Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy (Open Court, 2019), and it's about "ethical" cops: Rick Deckard (Phil's version and the movie version) and K from 2049. I've got two more book chapters in the works. Both are about religion. One of them, "Perturbations in the Reality Field: Logos, Gnosis, and Aletheia in Philip K. Dick's Late Works," should be coming out any day now in a book edited by Richard Feist called Jesuits in Science Fiction: Reason and Revelation on Other Worlds (Vernon Press). The latest is called "The Conquest of Death and the Divine Afterlife: Philip K. Dick's Life and Fiction of the 1960s," and it will be appearing in the The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick (Lexington, I think). I know several folks at DickFest are publishing in this book and I'm really looking forward to the discussions. I've also given a few conference presentations where I shared the stage with you, David. On the horizon: I'm gearing up for an article or two on PKD's ethics. 

TDH: What do you plan to talk about at the PKD Fest? 

Blake Wilson: Dunno! Probably something about religion or ethics. Or religion AND ethics. 

Thanks, Blake! See you in Colorado! 

Dick-Fest Fundraiser in Full Swing

A who's who from Fests past... 

The organizing committee for the 2024 Dick-Fest in Ft Morgan is working feverishly to curate a totally Dick-tacular event for this June 13-16. Currently there is a fundraiser at GoFundMe, where the gang has already raised more than $1500 to help pay location deposits and grease the wheels of civic involvement. The organizers are determined not to charge guests for the events. That's right: the talks and other events will be free to all who attend. So please consider donating to and/or attending the Fest. We'd love to see you there. 

Lord Running Clam sez, “For me it’s all about bringing the PKD fans together. Making friends, meeting and appreciating the art and spirit of each person. Phil's last resting place is here in the heart of beautiful Fort Morgan, Colorado, next to his baby twin-sister Jane. So come and pay your respects to this great writer and celebrate his life and work with your friends this summer of 2024. See you there!"

This is the first Colorado Dick-Fest since Covid, as well as the first to take place in Ft Morgan, where the bodies are buried. The amazing list of guests and speakers is still growing, but here are the players scheduled to appear so far: 

Lord RC

Joanathan Lethem

Sam Umland

Henri Wintz

Andrew Butler

David Gill 

Blake Wilson 

David Agranoff

DH Wilson

Keith Giles

Jens Christoph-Nolte

Ted Hand

Josh Lind

Frank Hollander

Get to Know the Fest Guest -- Part 1: Keith Giles

In preparation for the upcoming Dick-Fest in Ft. Morgan I will be featuring some of the guests on this humble blog as it rises from the ashes of the last decade. 

First up is Keith Giles, who goes WAY back in the world of PKD. Keith who was an early reader and commenter on this blog has since blossomed into a media mogul of sorts, with a series of popular books about Christianity, a podcast, and all sorts of other stuff. He's also helming Quoir Publishing which just put out an anthology which includes Tessa Dick among other PKD luminaries. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Keith will tell you all about it below: 

TDH: Can you tell us about your relationship to Dick? 

I've been a fan since roughly 1983, after BLADE RUNNER released and I bought the paperback version which, to my great surprise, was a completely different story called DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? After reading that novel, I decided to go back to the bookstore to find more PKD books. The next one was FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN SAID and by the time I got about halfway through that book I was a huge fan. 

I also lived for about 25 years in Orange County, California. This meant I had an opportunity to visit the apartment building where Phil lived in Santa Ana, and the hospital where he died. I also had the opportunity to hold signed copies of his novels in my hands at the local Orange Public Library. So, I never got to meet Phil in person, but I feel a close connection to him having lived in the same places he lived and walked the same streets that he did.

Since those early days, I've done my best to read nearly everything he's written, including all of his short stories and the vast majority of his novels. My Blade Runner and PKD vintage paperback collection is pretty obscene.

Most recently, I was asked to speak at the San Diego Comic-Con panel in 2023 which was a dream come true.

What do you plan to talk about at the fest? 

The topic I want to talk about at the DickFest this year is "The Exegesis and Quantum Science." This talk will include the influence of Valentinian theology and the Gospel of Thomas as well. 

 I believe there is also some talk about my joining a panel discussion with Ted Hand and Aharon Varady on PKD and religion.

TDH: Can you tell us a little about Quoir Publishing and the 'Augmented' anthology?

As of January of 2023, I became co-owner of Quoir Publishing. Prior to this I was only one of their published authors. So, even though I never dreamed of owning my own publishing company, the opportunity sort of dropped into my lap. 

Quoir is a publishing company by authors, for authors. That means we make sure all of our authors retain 100% ownership of their copyright and we offer 60% of the royalty to authors [compared to 10% or less offered by most other publishers]. We've been around for about 7 years now. Our goal is to publish great books and to promote and champion our authors and their work in every way possible.

Last year we published Volume 1 of aa brand new SF anthology called "Augmented" which featured some fantastic short stories by Tessa Dick, David Agranoff, Claudia Christian [Babylon 5], and many others. 

We're excited to publish more new SF titles in the next few months,including a new PKD-esque novel by David Agranoff called "People's Park" [March 2024], plus the SF novels, "So Eden Sank To Grief" by Eric Reitan and "RJ the Astronaut" by Jon Turney, both releasing in February, 2024.

TDH: Any other Dick-related stuff you want to promote? 

Last year Quoir was honored to publish Volume 1 of a PKD Short Story Anthology called "Sci-Fi Lullabies" and later this year [2024] we plan to publish Volume 2, featuring a Foreword by Tessa Dick. Volume 3 will come later next year with a Foreword by author and co-host of the DickHeads Podcast, David Agranoff.

Also, I taught a course at UTEP [UT El Paso] 2 years ago on The Gospel of Philip K. Dick and that I have an online course by the same name available here. 

There's more exciting stuff on the horizon for PKD fans to be excited about, but I can't talk about them just yet.

PKD Fest GoFundMe Live, Featuring Total Dick-Head Discount

 A GoFundMe page has been established to help defray the costs of the upcoming Dick-Fest in Ft Morgan, Colorado, June 13-16, 2024. What's more, I'm donating one seat in my upcoming Zoom class, The Total Dick-Head's Guide to Philip K. Dick, which starts January 30th. Just be the first to pledge $100 to the GoFundMe page in the comments of this post, and I you will be enrolled in my 16-week course with guests including: Jonathan Lethem, Gregg Rickman, Tim Powers, Linda Levy, and more -- a $195 value!

The funds will be used to make deposits and pay cleaning fees for the facilities we'll be using for the fest.

Make sure you leave an email in your pledge comment, or email me at thetotaldickhead(at)gmail.com. 

Regardless, Get Your Ass to Colorado!  

Announcing Dick-Fest 2024 in Ft. Morgan, Colorado!

 

Mark your calendars, Dick-Heads, and prepare yourselves for Dick-Fest 2024 -- June 13-16, 2024...

The Fest is being helmed by the incomparable Ganymedean Slime Mold, Lord Running Clam, who you may know as David Hyde. Designed to be a Dickian hybrid of fan and scholar cultures, The Fest is a petri dish of high weirdness, from which strange collaborations and even friendships can emerge. There will be lectures, music, art, imbibing, and esoteric conversation! Reconnect with your favorite Dick-head, or meet some new ones! 

Ft Morgan is, as they say, where the bodies are buried. In this case, Jane and Phil. The city and surrounding area provide important context to Dick's familial ancestry (hint: it's bleak!). And proximity, even to the deceased, is bound to stoke our enthusiasm even as we pay our respects. 

Featured speakers include: Andrew M. Butler, Sam Umland, David Agranoff, Ted Hand, Frank Hollander, Josh Lind, Blake Wilson, and myself. With many more names on the way. If you'd like to present or want to get involved in the planning stages of the event, shoot an email to me (thetotaldickheadATgmail.com) or Lord RC (pink-beamAThotmail.com). 

Stay tuned to this channel as more info becomes available. 

For reference, here's info about the 2012 Dick-Fest, as well as this one which inspired it. 

Announcing the Dates for the 2014 Philip K Dick Fest!

Even bigger news than the SYFY demotion, I've just heard from Umberto Rossi, and the plans for the 2014 Fest are underway! What's more, they have set the dates: April 25, 26 at UC Irvine! I'm especially excited that I don't have to plan it! But I will be there for sure, hopefully presenting something or other. There's a Facebook group, and there will probably be updates at the Festival website. Stay tuned, more news as it becomes available.

Now Read About Last Year, Then Purchase and Read My Fiction!

 
Happy New Year, gentle readers! 2012 was quite a ride for this humble blogger. Philip K Dick Festival, done and accomplished, a roaring success -- a success which still nourishes me during this cold and dark winter. Such memories: I gave Jonathan Lethem a ride in my car. Umberto Rossi and Laurence Rickels rode in that car too! Watching Radio Free Albemuth with 120 Dick-heads! These aren't sentences, mostly because no mere arrangement of words can capture how great it was.

Was there any other Dick news in 2012? Lawsuits, adaptations and rumors of adaptations, down websites, the rise of the Facebook PKD group, Precious Artifacts!, two issues of PKD Otaku!.

Pretty good year. 

Now, what do we have to look forward to in 2013? Well it's the year when Linklater's version of A Scanner Darkly is set. Will a quarter of the population get hooked on Substance D (otherwise known as Fox News)? Perhaps. Will we see a theatrical release or Netflix appearance of Radio Free Albemuth? Stay tuned to find out.

2013 is starting out on a high note for me personally, with not one, but two science fiction stories out today. My story "Escape Velocity" is in issue six of Speculative Edge which is available in both Kindle and print editions.

And I've got another story, "Bedroom Eyes" appearing in issue one of Theurgy Magazine. That one you can read online (here), and if you like it, you should probably order a hard copy (here). The cool thing is my co-editor at Pravic, Nathaniel K Miller also got a story placed in Theurgy, so they've obviously have good taste. Speaking of which, you have issue one of Pravic, right? Well stay tuned, issue number two is imminent.

In terms of Dick stuff, I've got Erik Davis' write up from Dortmund to run in the next couple days. Radio Free Albemuth at the Philip K Dick Film Festival! Reading Nick and the Glimmung with my seven-year-old. Sentence fragments, again! Time to go.

Umberto Rossi Recalls His Festival Experience

Words and pictures by Umberto Rossi:

Let me tell you all that my notions about the geography of the Bay Area were awfully foggy. I didn't even know that SFSU and Berkeley were two quite different places. However, while I was waiting for rescue (a bold team made up by Ted Hand and Dave Gill) I took a picture of this street sign because it sounded distinctly Dickian. Yet I could not recall what role this Shattuck Avenue played in Dick's world. I did need some anamnesis then, but it wasn't coming!

Thanks to Dave and Ted anamnesis came: and there, on the other side of the avenue, I saw--well, not the light, but surely the Shop. The repair shop where Hollis' repairmen were busy fighting against Jory and the forces of evil (or is it entropy?). Now they sell role games there, but hey, aren't games PKD stuff? Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next, Bluff, etc.? Though the Game-Players from Titan weren't there, I knew I was in Philip K. Dick territory.

Records are such a powerful Dickian topic. It seems our pal Phil thought some media were less evil than others, maybe even intrinsically good. Radio, ok. TV, bad. Newspapers, bad. Vinyl, good! Let's not forget that in a happy season of his life he was a music buff and vinyl collector who worked in a records shop: isn't this a form of small-scale utopia? And this is where he discovered Beethoven and Bach, not to mention Dowland. Flow our tears, the Dickhead said.

There are firefighters everywhere, of course, also in Italy, but--US firefighters are something special. No, it's got nothing to do with Phil, it's more a matter of Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451, and book-burning firemen. However, this pumper parked near the building where I slept fascinated me. Now I realize that this very ordinary fire engine has something so deeply American in it, something that makes me think of Ragle Gumm and his nameless small town. Maybe it's part of a layout where Verne Haskell is busy reproducing Woodland, his town.

Ok, but the PKD fest was not just places--and what places!--it was above all people. Names printed on the cover on a book which suddenly turned into real people you could talk to. And here we have the biographer extraordinnaire, Mr Gregg Rickman, and supreme interviewer. I am still waiting for the second volume of his bio, and I can't believe it will remain forever on his PC. Even Brian Wilson managed to release Smile, after all. C'mon, Gregg, we've been waiting for it for so long and all this time has passed us by--it doesn't seem to matter now... (thank you, Peter Gabriel!)

Can one think of a PKD fest without Jonathan Lethem? No, definitely not. But the presence of Rudy Rucker was unexpected. Let's call it a bonus. However, let's get accustomed to the idea that PKD Festivals will grow. There's no way to avoid it. I know someone doesn't like the idea, but hey, it was to be expected. Phil has got so many friends all around the world--can you tell them "stay at home"? I foresee a bigger fest in Southern California, and just try to imagine what will happen in 2018... 90th anniversary! (Well, I'm looking forward to the 2028 event... in Washington? A Million Dickheads March? Why not!)

Let's say these are the ghost of the last fest and the ghost of the next one! Well before the Fort Morgan event there was the now legendary Macerata conference in 2000... (there are also two events in the UK, but I leave comments about those to people who were there) I was one of the organizers in Macerata, and I will be in Dortmund with Stefan Schlensag and many others--let's say the EU branch of the PKD Church. The history of PKDom abroad goes on and on and on...

How could I ignore the Famous Director? John Alan Simon will, I hope, also direct the movie version of Time Out of Joint and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. In the meantime, we're waiting for the release of his ALBEMUTH dvd (or blue-ray). Or for the mystical apparition of his movie in cinema theatres all over the world. If he wins at Cannes (Academy Awards are unlikely) we will be there to clap our hands, on the side of the red carpet.

I wonder just how powerful is Dave Gill. Has anyone noticed that the movie theater nearby was showing Total Recall while we were busy talking about our pal Phil? He surely managed to have that film in this theatre.

 
Where does the borderline between scholarship and fandom lies? I don't know, I don't really give a damn. I only know that Lord Runnig Clam and Monsieur Henri Wintz, the mighty bibliographers, gave us PKD scholars such a powerful tool to investigate Dick's oeuvre... it will be on my desktop (physical, not digital) in the next years, helping me not to get lost among paperbacks, hardbacks, reprints, translations, etc. besides, they are such nice people!

The young scholar who gave us the Exegesis. Pamela Jackson, folks! Surely, like the Fairie Queen, she had a team of valiant knights to tackle the Monster, but it was quite a fight nonetheless, and the Exegesis panel managed to convey an impressive picture of the onslaught. However, PKD scholars everywhere can only be grateful to her for having managed the publication of this juggernaut of a book.

I can only think of Laurence Rickels, accomplished German cinema scholar and international academician, in black and white terms... echoes of Murnau, Lang and Pabst in the background. His presentation on the German integration simply amazed me. The apparition of Wernher Von Braun in a Disney documentary was something directly out of The Man in the High Castle and Gravity's Rainbow. One of the highlights of the festival, no doubt.

They say I'm a PKD scholar--hah! I'm just a part-time critic who struggles with novels greater than him, or a dwarf on the shoulders of giants. (A dwarf, mind you, not the Dwarf, that evil creature which rules the land of Mordor, whose capital is the seven-hilled Babylonian Meretrix...) But these are the real PKD scholars, folks! Erik Davis and Ted Hand, with their theological panel, really enlightened me. Moreover, Ted reascued me on Shattuck Avenue, where I might have remained stranded till PKD come...

Well, this is a detail of a house that isn't easy to photograph, for a complex series of complicated reasons. Let me just tell you that it's in Point Reyes Station, and that it didn't look the way I'd pictured it while reading Dick's stuff and Sutin and Rickman, but hey, does that really matter? Now it's branded on my memory, and I won't forget it. (On the other hand, the Marin County landscape, though much less bleak than Phil depicted it, is something I had somewhat imagined...)

And here is the mastermind of the event, Dr Gill hisself. How can I thank him? I can't, so let'd move to other issues. Such as the excellent food served in this restaurant, and the wealth of anecdotes on PKDom that he provided us with. Will Dave one day write the ultimate PKD biography? I am sure he has the chops to do it, because he is also a swell writer. Time will tell us. Joyce and Wilde had Ellmann, Phil might have Gill. I really hope so.

Marc Haefele Recounts His Dick-Fest Experience

As the post-fest glow starts to fade, it's time to start the Dick-Fest nostalgia. I was honored to meet PKD's editor at Doubleday, Marc Haefele, who accounts for his Fest experience below. (This article appeared in truncated form at the KPCC Blog).

Dickfest on the Bay

By Marc Haefele

The organizers promised 90, but 130 people turned out for the San Francisco State’s Philip K. Dickfest last month. It was a 3-day event and most of the seminars were Standing Room Only. Event leader David Gill, an adjunct professor at SFSU, a PKD scholar and longtime fan, declared the occasion not really a scholarly seminar, but rather an appreciation of the man who died in 1982 as a respected genre writer and, in the 30 years since, has been raised to the Pantheon of great U.S. authors.

I can’t think of anyone else that anything like that has happened to. But Dick was a special kind of writer, even in his edgy, fringy field. He dedicated some 40 novels and hundreds of short stories to the proposition that we cannot trust what we see, know who we are, or even know if our everyday world truly exists.

This point of view seemed border-line lunacy when Phil published his first work over 60 years ago, plumb in the middle of Cold War, McCarthy-Era America. But in the 21st Century,  it seems like pretty deep wisdom. Which is why post-modern European philosophers, like  Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek, have appreciated Dick as not just a fine novelist but as  a major thinker and  grappler with the key issues of post-modern ideas.  But starting way back when the mere post-WW II “Modern” (with its atom bombs, jet planes and LP records) was still a new thing.

Oddly, the predictive “science” in Dick’s science fiction hasn’t been a factor in his triumphant ascent. Dick, as Gill noted, was no better at foreseeing 21st Century innovations such as the Internet, the I-Phone and the Social Network than were most of his contemporaries. He promised us that by 2012 space travel would have taken us to distant stars, and that the Earth would have been desolated by WW III. He somehow didn’t even grasp the burgeoning technology that increasingly surrounded him in the `70s and early `80s, such as microchips and micro-computers.  He was not a cutting-edge predictive technologist---like HG Wells.

What he did get right about the era that extended from his time into our own was something much more important:  its dissolution of certainty, of absolutes, of truth itself.

So it surprised me that, despite this, a lot of the Dickheads at the conference were scientific high-tech professionals with mighty degrees, jobs and reputations. What does Phil Dick speak to them?

“He teaches us to eradicate the default trust in technology,” says Charles Martin Reid, Ph D, a chemical engineer at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.  He told his seminar that for centuries, science moved toward certainties. And then along come thinkers like Kurt Godel, with his “incompleteness theorems” and Dick. Now “the universe frays at the edges and knowledge keeps breaking down.”

Dick Scholar Doug Mackey’s seminar  looked at the same scientific progression  in terms of time perception, noting that Dick played with time as he elsewhere played with reality. Dick wrote one novel “Counter Clock World” in complete reverse time (famous modern author Martin Amis mimicked this theme much later in his “Time’s Arrow.”).  Dick’s time novel “Is still uncomfortable to read,” Mackey noted.  So is his 1959 “Time out of Joint”  where Dick also “is exiting the accepted temporal matrix.”

Laurence Rickels, who has a psychology chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, spoke on Dick’s German connections—the recurrent themes of German thought and music, as well as the Third Reich, that come up again and again in Dick’s work.  Rickels has written on the significance of mourning in human society and he spliced this topic into his Dick critique—the idea of reparations, of “Making Good.” Which is often, I think, the resolution of Dick’s novels.

Then  the discussion edged towards the thorny topic Dick’s religious convictions. Says Rickels,  “He clearly needs a savior and [often] goes and creates one. Yet his sanity and critical faculties won’t let him believe…”

This brought us to the central enigma of Phil Dick’s creative life—what he described as the religious experience of early 1974, when a series of occurrences brought to him what he called the “Pink Beam” of divine inspiration—and also what his eager editors experienced as a sudden collapse of
his sustained high-speed literary output of the previous 20 years.  Phil’s personal life had come apart, he experienced episodes of extreme paranoia, saw himself as persecuted by the US government, while he occasionally tried to reach out to the same agencies he thought were persecuting him via letters offering help waging the drug war. He was, as one then-confidant of his put it to me, “deeply disturbed” at this time. He embraced the gnostic belief he’d long examined in his writing—the idea that the universe is a field of struggle between good and evil deities. He eventually surmised that 1970s America was an illusion, that  the Roman Empire had never fallen, and that Richard Nixon was somehow now its emperor.

Out of fear and desperation, he fled the Bay Area to Orange County, behind whose conservative social bulwarks he apparently felt safer. He found a new milieu, made new friends, and completed a book on drug addiction and paranoia called “A Scanner Darkly” that was made into the most faithful and successful film of any of his works.

And he initiated the million-word analysis of himself and the Cosmos that he termed the “Exegesis,” a monster in several boxes that it took a team of scholars to drag into coherence. A panel of experts including the “Exegesis’” editors, scholars Pamela Jackson, Erik Davis, and renowned author Jonathan Lethem  (noteworthy as a major backer of Dick’s revival as literature) ran into overtime
trying to explain this vast tome, the size of eight PKD sf novels, and how, while it seemed to include every thought that then passed in and out of Dick’s head,  it was also a critique of all of Dick’s other writing and itself as well.

Dick’s last published works include ``VALIS,’’ “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” and “Radio Free Albemuth;” all of them somewhat autobiographical and each of them drawing on his enigmatic 1974 religious apercus. They are fascinating, tantalizing evocations of Dick’s “Final Conflict;” between his rational self and his dire need to believe in something powerful, good, and beyond rationality.

Beyond this, toward the event’s end, Nottingham-Trent University Professor John Goodridge made a necessary and fundamental point that seemed to have earlier slipped away: Dick was also an immensely talented author whose characters, human and otherwise, live, breathe and die on his pages,  a skilled portrayer of“intensely crafted, delicately written” fiction of the highest order.

Which is the way most of his present and future readers will remember him.

Dick-Fest 2012 Totally Recalled

 Photo: That's me interviewing Jonathan Lethem, Laurence Rickels, Rudy Rucker, and John Alan Simon. Click to see the rest of the image: Rucker and Simon have been cut by the auto-formatting...

Though I'm still pretty tired, as well as behind in my grading and housework, I guess I better put my thoughts down about the Dick-Fest before the memories start to fade. They tell me it was an unqualified success. I actually didn't get to see much of the Fest as I was running from emergent situation to technical catastrophe almost the entire time.

First off, there were more than 130 who registered. The big lecture hall/theater where we were staging the fest only holds 140, and people were still registering the night before. I was sweating. Talk about sweating, I met Dr Laurence Rickels at the airport and drove him to his "Hospitality Suite" on campus - only I couldn't find the damn place.  Talk about an anxiety dream! But Rickels is a cool cat, a nice guy, and I drove him around on Friday before the fest. I can't say I "get" his book now, but he did offer this kernel of wisdom: Naziism is Psychoanalysis in reverse. That sure got me thinking. Rickels also had a cool video presentation of old space race stuff.

The next night I drove Jonathan Lethem to his suite and we had a nice talk. I knew we'd be pulled in different directions at the fest, so I was glad to get the time. Very nice guy. I've got some friends that call me "Dave" and some friends that call me "David" - Lethem is a "David" friend. I got him to sign my copy of "Men & Cartoons" too! His keynote was funny, touching, and revolutionary - more on that when the videos come out -- more on when the videos are coming out later.

The highlight of the event was the screening of Radio Free Albemuth. Well before that we had a nice dinner in the "Nob Hill Room" at my school, with an open bar, and pretty good food. But the movie was a hit, and seeing it with a theater full of Dick-heads was wonderful and rewarding for me personally.

I finally got to meet Umberto Rossi. A gentleman and a scholar. And of course got to catch up with old friends Lord Running Clam, Perry Kinman, Frank Hollander, Laura Entwisle, and more. The whole thing reconfirmed for me that Dick-heads are some of the nicest, smartest, and most generous people on the planet. In addition, I met lots of cool new people: Chris Rudge, John Burton, Doug Mackey. I can't list everyone.

The Verge has just posted their video and article about the fest, and they're great! Check them out here. More pictures to follow.

A Little Update For Us Tempunauts

Preparations are now in high gear for the PKD Festival, now just two weeks away. Things are really falling into place.

Stuff I'm really excited about:

Grania Davis will be talking about her experiences with PKD. As will Charles Platt, one of the first PKD told of 2-3-74.

Lethem will be talking!

Laurence Rickels will be discussing The Simulacrum - will we finally decode the mystery?

We're screening Radio Free Albemuth - it's gonna be really cool to see that with a theater full of Dick-heads! And then we'll have a Q & A with director John Alan Simon afterwards...

Did I mention we've got 85 registered attendees?! I'm both nervous and excited. And also afraid it'll all be over too soon.

Need some reading material to get you through these long weeks? Well I just had my first short story published by the good folks over at the Jersey Devil Press. It's really more Lethem-y than Dickian, but it's called "The Guitarist" and you can read it here. Let me know what you think. I've got another story coming out in the October issue of Theurgy magazine, and my writing buddy and co-editor at Pravic, Nathaniel K Miller is also going to be in same issue. So I'll link to that soon!

Revised Festival Schedule - Saturday September 22.

 

We've just finished scheduling the break-out sessions for Saturday Sept 22 at the PKD Fest. Click below to embiggen the schedule pics...

Announcing Pravic Magazine

Dear readers, while planning continues apace for the PKD Festival scheduled for this September (have you filled out our online survey yet?), I am striking out in a new direction. As the most devoted of you know, I have been trying my hand at writing my own science fiction. I've been disappointed in my survey of the SF currently being published, and when my own rejection letters started piling up, I decided to do something about it.

So, today, fellow Dick-head and author Nathaniel K. Miller and I are announcing the birth of Pravic Magazine:

Pravic is a new magazine bringing you literary Science Fiction stories, along with discussions of esoteric pop culture, music and movie reviews, and anything else we feel like. Why? We’re unhappy with the current state of SF – especially what’s being published. Having read what’s out there, we’re left feeling most of that shit is awful.

We think we can do better. We want to build a new grammar for SF.

In short, we’re here to fuck with your program.

Send your fiction, non-fiction, art, and whatever mind-bending miscellany we haven’t conceived of yet to pravicmagazine(at)gmail.com

Read our New Commandments for Science Fiction here.

And, if you know any good illustrators, please let us know... 

Read this super cool SF story by Nathaniel K Miller here.

Total Dick-Head Is Five Years Old Today! (now with links)

You read that right, compadres! TDH is five years old today. In a few more years perhaps the blog will be mature enough to get over the dick jokes, but anyhoo, it's been a fairly unqualified success.

Seriously, the coolest thing about the endeavor was being a part of the PKD scene and meeting so many cool people. Mr Hand over at Philip K Dick and Religion has become a great friend, and Patrick Clark and the Otaku folks are super-cool. Erik Davis and Lord Running Clam... I promised myself I wouldn't cry. It's also nice to see PhilipKDickFans.com up and running again. And Frolix-8 has consistently churned out awesome PKD content for ages. And now we have a festival page. Now we're on Facebook too, please 'like' us so we can look big time. It's nice to see more Dick on the Internet.

It's been a big five years for PKD too:

Published by Library of America
Briefly the subject of two dueling bio-pics
Back-handed compliments by The New Yorker
High Profile Profiles in LA Times, NY Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek...you name it
Cinematic adaptations including Next and Adjustment Bureau
A good adaptation of Radio Free Albemuth and talk of a Gondry-helmed Ubik
Publishing of 975 pages of Exegesis writings
(I was going to link all of these, but you're so good with The Google, you do it)

So it's been a fun time. For some reason I feel like the wave has crested, like the publishing of The Exegesis was Dick's high-water mark in pop-culture - actually I think it was a little before that. Maybe I'm wrong, and when Ubik comes out they'll fire up the Philip K Dick Article Generating Machine and churn out "Troubled Misfit Druggie Wondered What Was Real (And He Predicted Robots!)" articles by the dozen.

So, you probably want some links:

Miguel Conner has posted a cool interview with John Simon, director of Radio Free Albemuth (which we'll all have watched some day) over at Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. Check it out.

There's short preview trailer that's been released in anticipation of the Full Trailer for the Total Recall remake:



It's got a dodgy chair - generally considered to be the kiss of death in PKD adaptations - those and hats.

Erik Davis, Ted Hand, and I will be presenting at this year's Esotericism Conference in sunny Davis, California on Friday, July 20. You can learn more here.

Forget Paul Giamatti as PKD, reader Mike Winder found this pic to convince all of us in the PKD group on Facebook that Jeff Bridges is PKD:

Festival News

Lots of cool stuff happening with the PKD Festival to be held in SF this September. First, we've updated the website, so now you can head over there and sign up to be on the mailing list, that way you'll be in the know for the latest developments.

Next we've had two exciting confirmations:

Paul M. Sammons, author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner will give a talk on everybody's favorite replicant flick. Mr Sammons interviewed PKD a few times and is in a unique position to talk about this stuff.

Also, Rich Doyle, annotator and author of the Afterword in the Exegesis will be be presenting. Additionally, Rich will be rounding out our Exegesis panel discussion with Pam Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Erik Davis, and me.

I'm on spring break this week so I'll have some time to work on the lodging arrangements and a Kickstarter project, so stay tuned.

Now Read About Last Year (2010)

I wish I could find this scene from the blooper reel to the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, during which Roy Scheider tries over and over again to get a ball-point pen to sit suspended in the air in a harness made of fishing line to try to depict the zero-g environment of space travel. Try as he might, the stupid thing will not stay. It's a nice metaphor for 2010, which felt at times like an endless blooper reel.

I thought we'd have seen both the Adjustment Bureau and Radio Free Albemuth adaptations in 2010, but neither materialized - though RFA made a strong showing at NYC's Gotham Screen Film Fest. Adjustment Bureau is now due out in Spring of 2011. So Inception was the closest we got to a PKD adaptation in 2010 - and it apparently was inspired by Scrooge McDuck. I actually plan on seeing the film this week and hope I can write something up about it.

Highlights of 2010 included:

The Philip K Dick festival was held in August 2010 in Colorado. Definitely my funnest vacation of the year. A great time was had by all of the dozen or so who showed up. (Does this mean we're only a year and a half away from the next PKD Fest scheduled for the Bay Area 2012?! Yikes!)

Word arrived that two new Exegesis volumes are headed our way.

The arrival Laurence Rickels's nearly-indecipherable book I Think I Am: Philip K Dick - a long-awaited examination of Dick's irv made by a shining star in the academic community which, like many things in life, straddles the line between clever literary analysis and opaque, post-Freudian academic wankery.

A new edition of Anne Dick's memoir Search for Philip K Dick, was released by Tachyon publications (with a new Introduction written by yours truly). A fun read, an important resource, and now... even easier to get...

Scott Timberg's pair of great articles about PKD: one about his time in Southern California and one about Anne and her memoir. The ratio between good, insightful articles about PKD and the glorified press releases we've read about PKD in the past is headed in the right direction.

Cornell University selected Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as their incoming freshmen read for 2010 and I made a fun trip to Ithaca to talk about the book at the local public library.

It was a great year for me personally. The New York Times article and my Introduction of Anne Dick's memoir are accomplishments I'm quite proud of, and I hope to be able to build on these in 2011.

What else is there to look forward to?

Another academic book about PKD! This one by Italian Dick-head Umberto Rossi who has been kind enough to share some of his work right here on this blog. I have high hopes for Rossi's book.

I can't think of anything else to look forward to... besides burritos and stuff. Oh and maybe this year we'll see Radio Free Albemuth in theaters in addition to Adjustment Bureau. That would be cool. If two PKD movies hit theaters this year, well, you know what that means: prepare yourself for the onslaught articles examining 'Hollywood's Fascination with the Unlikely King of Sci-Fiʼ...

This may sound insincere coming from a Total Dick-Head, but I couldn't do this without you, gentle readers, so keep those insightful comments and gossipy emails coming this year. In fact there's gonna be some really cool never-before-seen stuff.... in the very next post!

I almost forgot to mention that this blog has received the coveted Top Kidney Disease Blog award of 2010 from the prestigious Certified Nursing Assistant website, based (I'm guessing here) upon the number of times the word PKD appears (which for many, sadly, does not stand for Philip K Dick but Poly-cystic Kidney Disease). And this is like the most Dickian thing ever, right?! I mean this weird, grammatically-awkward operation, Certified Nursing Assistant is giving away awards based on a computer's misreading of subtle linguistic quirks! Oooh, and a banner!

(note this content was removed in 2013 when the nurses contacted me repeatedly and asked to have it removed. Why did you send it to me in the first place, I was tempted to ask). 

I heard a numerologist on right-wing radio (WTF?! Right?!) and she was saying that the eleven in 2011 is a door, and we can be whoever we want to be when we go through that door - and this is our year to do that. Phil Dick reminded us in his novels that time is door we can pass through in only one direction, no matter how hard we may try to do otherwise. So choose your two-thousand-and-eleven-door wisely dear readers.

Sentient Gravity - by John Fairchild

I'm pleased to be able to publish here, for you Dick-heads, the paper John Fairchild presented at the Philip K Dick Festival earlier this month in Colorado. John had to give this talk outside on the gazebo instead of in the comfort of the library, and I know I had trouble hearing him at times over the roar of passing biker gangs, so I'm glad to be able to read this at my leisure. John has been involved with the PKD scene since the newsletter days and transcribed a number of the letters in the most recent edition of PKD's Selected Letters 1980-82. This is dense stuff and Mr Fairchild does us all a real service by breaking it down for us... There are seven parts to this essay and I'm going to post them one at a time, because I need to stretch out this wonderful free content while I busy myself with the first weeks of the Fall semester, and because I know if I publish something too long you guys won't read it. Now, without further ado,

Sentient Gravity

A talk on The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-1982

by John Fairchild

The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1980-1982 is the sixth and last volume of the Selected Letters. We’re going to be touching on just a few aspects of this last volume. We’re going to be looking mainly at the letters to Patricia Warrick. At the time, Patricia Warrick was a Professor of English at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Her major book on Phil is Mind in Motion, The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, 1987.

I’d like to start off with just one definition. Most of you are familiar with VALIS; Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Phil had a change in preferred nomenclature during this period. He preferred to talk about the macrometasomakosmos. The macrometasomakosmos is VALIS, the Logos, the Cosmic Christ, Plato’s Forms, and Pythagoras’ kosmos.

I The role of Dialectic

Dialectic comes up many times in this last volume, often in ways that are not immediately recognized. We usually think of dialectic in terms of Hegel— thesis, antithesis, and synthesis creating a new thesis. This will show up as a model of how information gets arranged conceptually in the universe. However, there are numerous examples of more complex concepts that take dialectic as their basis. Some of these are hierogamy, enantiodromia, and homeostasis—these are all related.

(1) Hierogamy: Greek; “holy marriage.” These were symbolic rituals where human participants represented a god and goddess. It is the harmonization of opposites. It shows up in Jungian psychology, per Phil. “And it is the psychological hierogamy, the unification of the opposites in the collective unconscious, that produces psychological wholeness, according to Jung.” (p. 38) (All page numbers here are from the Letters.)

(2) Enantiodromia: Greek; the process by which something becomes its opposite, and the subsequent interaction between the two. “…(E)nantiodromia is the primary instrument by which the structure of the macrometasomakosmos is achieved and preserved.” (p.66)

(3) Homeostasis is the self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. Homeostatic responses can be observed in all levels of life—atom, molecule, cell, organ, organism, population, and community—and in a wide range of time intervals—from a fraction of a second… to hundreds of years for community changes. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, hereafter referred to as EB.) Phil says the macrometasomakosmos self-corrects to its own map. (p. 132)

Phil’s use of the term dialectic relies more on fusion than building on contradiction. His dialectic usually consists of A reaching the highest state it can reach, then B growing or leaping out of A yet containing the best of A. From there, C makes a quantum leap and supersedes A and B yet is still a fusion of the two.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Lecture at the PKD Fest

My story on the Philip K Dick Festival is up over at io9.com.

You can download or listen online to my lecture on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?from the festival here. It's about an hour long and broken up into 3 parts. Video to follow...